In multimedia social networks, there are a flood of images and videos from many different members. People generally only look at a small fraction of the images or videos that their contacts in the social network publish. In an effort to address the problem, some people condense (summarize) their videos when sharing videos, and share only a small portion of the images.
There are methods for automatically summarizing a collection of images or videos. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,630,562, there is a method for automatically summarizing a video (i.e. editing the video to produce a shorter version of the video) using a singular value decomposition. U.S. Pat. No. 7,639,275 describes a method of summarizing video content including football by retaining the highlights of the video and omitting non-highlights. In this manner, a viewer can watch the game in a shorter amount of time than would be necessary to watch the entire game.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,956,026 provides a method identifying a hierarchical collection of key frames in a digital video. A video summary includes of the collection of key frames and the video can be browsed by viewing just the key frames.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,483,618 provides a method for generating a video summary in which content of low quality or very little or no interest is identified and removed.